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Dear Graham

This isn’t an emotional plea but a practical one. I have, as you can see, a completely normal, boring Anglo-Saxon name. I have never minded this – it saved me some bother at school, for example – but now in this digital age it’s becoming a nightmare. I wasn’t an “early adopter” of any of this technology, so every time I sign up for a new service literally thousands of Andy Smiths have been there before me, and I can’t choose a username that is anything at all like my actual name. Even the permutations with underscores, birth years etc are taken. I don’t want to have a username that’s as complicated as a password. And I don’t want to be Sword of Albion or Stormbringer or Fluffikins...